Relinquish
by Splinter Cell
Summary: After the war ends, lucius Malfoy sits alone in an Azkaban cell. Unable to physically harm him, his goalers wish to break his spirit and the only thing that keeps Lucius from surrendering his will are his memories...of Harry. Implied Slash.


Relinquish  
  
Disclaimer: What can I say? Not mine. Genre: Angst. Warnings: IMPLIED SLASH! Nothing graphic though. Um, also mentions of minor character death. Pairings: Lucius x Harry. Rating: PG-13.well I found it mildly upsetting and I wrote it! Notes: Originally meant to be an entry for the Beloved Enemies Drabble contest but it refused to cooperate and stick to the word limit. Oh well. Is also unbeta-ed and was written in a couple of hours. And re-reading it, I realise that it gets weaker towards the end. Archive: If ya want. Feedback: As always, all is welcome.  
  
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In the centre of an Azkaban cell, he sits; like nothing so much as a stone statue of Buddha himself, garbed as he is in a plain grey prison robe. His hair is swept back behind his ears and lies quiescent down his back, neither breeze nor movement displacing a single strand.  
  
The cell is enormous; enchanted so that the walls stretch far away into the distance, farther than the eye can see. In the strictest sense of the word, there is no ceiling.there is merely a uniform greyness to the entire enclosure, in which no corners, no sides, no tops and no bottoms can be discerned. And he, monochromatic being that he is, blends in almost perfectly with this environment, much to the chagrin of those who Watch.  
  
They could not kill him. Even exposed as a Death Eater, his Clan wields far too much power in the outside world for him to be killed. The name he bears is a religion that even now inspires in its followers fear and obedience. Even now, with his family destroyed and his Clan in hiding, even now, his name retains the ability to slip into the ordinary subconscious, flip a few switches and have people looking over their shoulder, bowing their heads, whispering their words so that He does not hear them, wherever He may be.  
  
They could not kill him. They could not even physically harm him.  
  
But he was far too dangerous to go free.  
  
So they are trying to break him by depriving him of his senses. The cell is colourless and unfurnished - as far as his eyes can see, all is featureless and grey. When his body makes its inevitable but infrequent demands of him, he is immediately Obliviated on returning to the cell so that as far as he is concerned, he has never left it. The only textures are his coarse robe, his skin and his hair. The room is kept at a constant temperature, one slightly too low for actual comfort but not so low as to be able to give him something to focus on. It is utterly silent, shielded as it usually is from the screams of the main prison.  
  
It would have worked well, had he not himself been a connoisseur of this very tactic. So over time they've experimented. They've deprived him of food and water for days at a time or they've shot him full of caffeine. They keep the cell lit unnaturally bright so that he can't sleep and try and weaken his will by sheer exhaustion and hunger.  
  
But he knows this game and he knows there are only very few viable options left open for them to try. He never ate much to begin with and mastered the ability to do away with the need to sleep at a young age. He plays a game with them; sitting quietly, like this, hour after hour, day after day and he knows that he's getting to them because otherwise his prison wouldn't keep changing.  
  
So sitting like this, eyes open but unseeing, he steps back from reality and enters a world unlike any other. His memories, from his childhood to Hogwarts, his relationships with Severus and Narcissa, the good times and the bad.  
  
And Harry.  
  
Their Harry; The Boy-Who-Lived. His Harry; from the child he hated, to the man who showed him compassion when Draco died, to the man he gradually and against his will grew to love and who, though he kicked and fought all the way, grew to love him.  
  
Harry.  
  
Strong as he knows he is, he is no longer arrogant enough now to presume that his continued survival and sanity has nothing to do with the beautiful, bittersweet memories he holds of his lover.  
  
No, that final battle was humbling, in more ways than one. Filled with the knowledge of their inescapable defeat, the Army of Darkness had fought with nobility they had no right to whilst the Order, tainted and corrupted by the horror it had seen and been forced to deal out had fought with a savagery born of desperation and exhaustion. The War had taught them all lessons, not least of which that there are no true delineations between Good and Evil, Slytherin and Gryffindor, Right and Wrong, merely relative shades of individual morality that are acceptable to one man yet not to another and which cannot survive without their complimentary antithesis.  
  
He knew he cared for the boy - man - before that final battle. Harry's devotion and his loyalty, his courage and his honour, everything that the other thought he'd lost.. It had been dizzying, disquieting, euphoric. But it had been love, he knew, when he'd told Harry he couldn't fight with him and it had felt as if his heart was being torn in two as he walked out the door. He knew it was love Harry felt for him when he'd found him, slumped against a tree to hold his broken back together and Harry had held him close, crying because he couldn't remember the healing spells he'd learnt at school and because he could feel the life slipping out of the older man, the enemy, he held in his arms.  
  
He knows it was love, because Harry saved his life, when he should have been pointing a wand between his eyes and finishing the job a couple of Aurors began.  
  
He blinks, ripped from his memories as a drawn-out scream shatters the silence of the cell. With a critical ear, he listens and deduces dispassionately that it is a woman's scream, one of terror rather than pain. A small smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth as he slips back into his memories. They've tried this before - though apparently they haven't been informed that he knows Narcissa died laughing at her killers.  
  
Harry. Holding him tightly, as if his strength could alone anchor the Death Eater's soul to his body. Harry whispering to him as the Dementors escorted him to Azkaban - Est robuste...I vous aime...I reviendra pour vous - in French, of all languages, so that the milling guards would not understand what had been said. He would have given up the fight, long ago, if not for those few words. He would have relinquished all and given into to the madness of his reality.but for Harry.  
  
In the wall-less room, the echoes of the woman's scream merge into one, long, ululation which is - if he tries very hard not to remember what the sound actually is - weirdly beautiful; rising and falling like his lover's chest as he had lain, all those years ago, sprawled against Lucius, with the first, soft light of early morning falling across his face and smoothing away those wretched lines of anger and of hurt that Lucius had watched being etched ever deeper into Harry's soul with the dawning of each new day. 


End file.
